and suddenly there's hope again
by The Crownless Queen
Summary: When Liv died and became a zombie, the last thing she expected was to meet her soulmate - and somehow, it hadn't even crossed her mind that he might be a zombie too. Soulmates AU.


_Word count:_ 3787

" **and suddenly there's hope again"**

 **.o.**

Before the 'accident' – or rather, the day she died and was reborn _(woke up? The whole thing hadn't been that clear, really)_ as a zombie _(because clearly her life hadn't been complicated enough)_ – Liv used to think that it was a shame she and Major weren't a perfect match.

Sure, they were a good match. They got on perfectly and she loved him so much she felt like her heart could burst whenever she thought of him – he was kind and sweet _(and yes, kind of wild in bed, which was_ _ **great**_ _too_ ). In short, he was the perfect fiancé, and she couldn't wait to spend the rest of her life with him.

They weren't the perfect match though, the one every little girl dreams of when they first hear the stories. They're not soulmates.

They don't have each other words. Somewhere in the world, a man or a woman has the answer to the question tattooed on Major's hip, and elsewhere someone carries her words on their body the same way she does theirs.

It kind of sucked sometimes, to know that the universe somehow thought they weren't made for each other, but they had chosen each other, and to them that's what made everything they built worth so much more than anything some mystical power could give them.

They had talked about it too, sometimes. About what they'd do if or when either of them met their soulmates.

They had had countless fights about it before they both accepted that they could keep that bond strictly platonic if it ever came to it. After all, not all soul-matches ended up together, and some people never even met theirs.

 _(secretly, Liv especially liked the idea that Major would be there for her no matter what, and that he'd accept her even if her match might not – everyone had heard one of those tragic stories, and they were always something those who hadn't met their matches worried about)_

So yes, she had been kind of miffed that some higher power saw fit to have her and Major worry when they clearly would spend a happy married life together, but she had gotten used to it. They sometimes even tried to guess at what both of their matches would look like, or whether they'd like each other.

It had been fun.

Of course though, that had been Before.

After… Well, after she had just been kind of relieved _(and wasn't that awful of her, to be relieved that the man she loved wasn't bound to her in_ _ **that**_ _way?)_ , but also curious.

Knowing he would have a chance to have something close to perfection with someone else – someone who wasn't currently dead and eating the brains of the deceased – gave her the strength she needed to break off their engagement.

It was for the best. They couldn't be together now that she was like this, and while she knew she was breaking both of their hearts, at least he had a shot at something else.

After all, she had died, and somewhere in the world, someone had probably woken up to find the once jet black words inked on his skin faded to a light white scar of the same shape.

She felt sorry for them too. It was one thing not to want to meet your match, but it was an entirely different thing to know it'd never happen.

Being a zombie seemed to ruin a lot more lives than just hers – who would have guessed?

 **.i.**

Strangely, it didn't occur to Liv to check her own mark until weeks after her death.

Not so strangely, her mother was the one who brought it into the conversation.

"I have to admit, I'm not a fan of this white color – you had such lovely brown hair dear, I don't see why you thought you needed to change that – but this haircut really looks good on you. I knew you'd get tired of hiding your mark under that mass of hair. Why, when you were a little girl you used to display it proudly for the world to see. I remember that…"

Liv tuned her out, white noise filling her head _(a part of her noticed absently that being dead didn't stop one from feeling panicked – that was apparently too much to ask for)_ as she replayed her mother's words to herself.

Her hand reached almost unconsciously for the back of her neck, where the words – or rather, word - her 'soulmate' would one day say to her had appeared, inked in cursive letters, the day she was born.

"It's still there?" She asks, bewildered. She had been so sure the tattoo had been erased when she had died, the way they always were when the person wearing them died, but apparently this was another way through which her Zombie-ness would surprise her.

Her mother startled. "Of course it's still there, where else would it be?" She reached worriedly for Liv's forehead with the back of her hand. "Are you alright? You're not warm but you might have contracted some kind of virus… Who knows what kind of nasty thing is out there, waiting to get the jump on you when your system lets its guard down."

Liv barely restrained her laughter – a nasty virus indeed – and shook off the concern. "I'm fine mom. I was just… Thinking of something else…" She trailed off, noticing that her mother didn't look convinced, and did what she did best these days: flee to avoid conflict.

"Oh would you look at the time, I have to go. I swore to Peyton I'd buy her dinner tonight so, yeah, I have to go and, uhm, get dinner. Bye, see you!"

She was out of the door before her mother had the time to blink, barely managing to grab her purse and her jacked in passing.

She tried to put her mother's words out of her mind after that, but they kept coming back, and she stopped at the first shop with a mirror inside, reaching with shaking fingers to lift the hair obscuring the mark on her neck.

It was still there, the ink as black as it had ever been, the cursive just as loopy.

How was this even possible?

 **.ii.**

Finding out that she's not the only zombie in the world was both relieving and terribly frightening.

It took a weight off of her mind to realize that she's not the only one to have been cursed this way, but Liv was also pretty sure that Blaine is not the kind of zombie she wanted in her life. For one thing, he's the one who turned her (and despite his words he didn't really seem all that apologetic about ruining her life), and for another he's probably the worst choice of person to have been turned a zombie.

He said that his death changed him, but for all that she didn't exactly know him before that, what she had seen so far kind of proved him wrong.

She was so relieved when he left that she almost managed to ignore the sick feeling that she hadn't seen the last of him, and that whatever was about to happen, she wouldn't like it.

Before that though, she had managed to ask him about his mark. She figured that if anyone could answer her questions it would be another zombie, and seeing as he was the only one she knew, he would have to do.

Unfortunately, Blaine was no help on that matter either. His match, whoever they had been, had apparently died long before he had ever met them, and so he hadn't noticed any change after his own 'death'.

 **.iii.**

Liv and Ravi talked about soulmates mark exactly once. She knew she should probably have mentioned it as soon as Ravi began to look for a cure, but telling him that somehow her mark hadn't disappeared felt too personal, and she was sure he would overreact.

She hadn't been wrong on that point.

"But don't you see, Liv? It's a sign – if you mark's still there, then that means you're not as dead as you thought. This really gives credit to my theory about you being undead rather than actually dead and then somehow waking up.

"It's a shame we don't really know what causes those marks, because if we did I'm sure it could help isolate the origin of what affected you. Still, we know that it didn't affect the part of your brain regulating them, so we can eliminate everything targeting those areas…"

He repeated 'This is a good sign' at least a dozen times, showing the eager excitation of a child before Christmas, before Liv finally had enough and told him in very clear words that no, it wasn't a good thing.

"You do remember that the only reason I broke up my engagement with Major – aka the love of my life – was because I woke up as a zombie and had to avoid him so I wouldn't go all 'brains, grrr, I need brains' on him, right? In what world is me still having a chance to meet my soulmate a good thing when I would have to stay as far away from them as possible just so they could live?"

Unfortunately, Ravi took her remarks as a sign that she would eventually get cured – because of course it made sense to think that her mark hadn't disappeared because it somehow knew that one day it would have had to reappear – and was subsequently insufferable until Clive arrived to ask if they had any information on his latest case.

She hadn't had any 'vision' yet, but she would fake one if that's what it took to get out of the morgue and away from Ravi's too cheerful mood.

By the time they had closed the case – once she had seen the victim's house, it hadn't been hard to figure out that her abusive husband had been responsible, but it had taken them the rest of the afternoon to get a proper confession and all the paperwork filled – it had been too late to go back to the morgue. She would have to wait for the next day to apologize.

Liv made the effort to come in early the next morning, and offered an apology coffee to Ravi. If those last few months had taught her anything, it was that bringing food to someone you had offended always worked as an apology _(she has had a lot of apologies to make recently – too many even)_.

Unsurprisingly, Ravi was already hard at work when she arrived. Not so unsurprisingly, he actually apologized first.

"About yesterday… I wanted to say, I'm sorry. Someone pointed out to me that you had a right to be ill at ease on that subject, and I should probably have been more sensitive – but you know, it seemed (well, it still does honestly) like such an amazing opportunity to learn about both your condition and what triggers the marks that I didn't really think about your feelings for a while. So there you are, I'm sorry and I won't mention the subject again unless you bring it up first."

"Uhm, someone pointed that out to you?" Liv asked, slightly bewildered.

Ravi blushed and staggered out an answer _(was it weird that she only now realized that she had never seen him blush?)_ , and that was how Liv found out about Alicia, the charming woman that was Ravi's match – they had met as kids, tried their hand at romance and decided to stay best friends, and Skyped as often as they could since they lived on opposite sides of the country these days.

("Wait, you told her you worked with a zombie and she didn't hang up on you?"

"What? Oh no, I just mentioned that you had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and still hadn't met you match, and that I asked you why you didn't want to seek them out. She doesn't believe in zombies – you have to admit, it's pretty hard to when you're not confronted with it every day."

"That's actually pretty close to the truth. Except, you know, for the fact that unless I stop feeding I probably won't die anytime soon. How will you explain that?"

"A miraculous recovery?")

By the time she remembered the coffee, it was stone cold, but at least they were back to normal. Or as normal as they could be.

 **.iv.**

Some people's mark were long sentences – sometimes they even contained the name of the person you were supposed to meet, which was really helpful – and were full of information about what your first meeting with your soulmates was going to be like. It could tell you where it would happen, sometimes when or with whom, and they were usually sentences you only heard just the once in your life. You could be prepared, in a way.

Other people – a majority of the population actually – weren't that lucky. Liv had even read once that it had been estimated that over twenty-five percent of the population was born with some variation of a greeting written somewhere on their bodies.

Liv was a lucky member of that part of the population. While she didn't have a simple ' _hi_ ' or ' _hello there_ ' the way her parents did, the ' _You?_ ' scribbled on the back of her neck wasn't much more helpful.

She had stopped counting the false alarms she had had over the years – and that, even before meeting Major – when it had become clear that if she ever met her soulmate, they would have to be the one to make the first move if they wanted to be introduced properly.

Maybe that was why she didn't really take notice of Lowell Casey, apart from the 'he's a suspect for the murder of Holly' and 'he keeps showing up in the visions I have of her life'. In retrospect, she probably should have been more suspicious of the way he had opened up after she started interrogating him directly – it might have prepared her somewhat for what came next.

 **.v.**

When Liv agreed to go to Holly's wake – grudgingly, she might add – she did so only to try to find some clue as to who might have killed her ex-sorority sister.

Her plan was to get in, find something as quickly as possible, and then get out. Being there was awkward enough what with her having eaten Holly's brain, and she really wasn't eager to top that by spending time with people she had just helped interrogate about Holly's murder.

Somehow, that ended up with her having drinks with Lowell – who claimed to be innocent and actually seemed to be telling the truth – away from everyone else.

"It's hot," she commented absently as she sipped the drink. It wasn't bad though. In fact, it was even pretty good. She hadn't had a good drink in way too long.

"Perks of dating a zombie."

She almost dropped her glass in surprise.

"You're…?"

"Yes. And you? I assumed, but please tell me the hair – and well, everything else – isn't a fashion choice."

"It's not." Liv swallowed hard. "But how? You don't look like me at all - your hair's even black!"

"I dye it actually," Lowell explained. "I know, it's a little vain of me, but blond really isn't my color."

That… was actually a very good explanation. Liv couldn't quite believe she hadn't thought of that herself – it would certainly have helped with her mother, though by now it was probably too late to resort to hair dye (beside, she actually liked the way her hair was now).

What followed was probably the most truthful (and fun) discussion she had had with anyone in a long while – she could talk about zombie problems with Ravi, and she was grateful for that, but he didn't really get it the way another zombie did.

"Anyway, you never did answer my question," Lowell said after a moment of silence.

"What question was that?"

"The one about you having a boyfriend."

"Ah yes! I mean no – I mean, no, I don't have boyfriend. I had, but you know, zombie stuff, and well, we're not together now. So yeah, no boyfriend." She was rambling – why was she rambling?

Lowell smiled (he had a very nice smile too). "Good – because I'm not really interested in being just friends."

"Sorry, what?" Was he back on that?

"Ah yes, sorry – see, you said my words, and I assume I said yours too, so I think we should at least try to go on a proper date."

"I said your words?" God, was she repeating what he'd just said? Why wasn't Holly's amazing 'live in the moment' brain helping her now?

"Yes." He smirked. "Trust me, it's not like I could ever forget them. Do you know that I spent years wondering what kind of person would start off their first conversation by ' _What happened up in that plane?_ ' and why would anyone want to know? It drove my parents mad – they refused to let me get onboard of any plane for the longest time. Thought something bad would happen to me up there.

"I've got to say though: reality definitely beats the fiction. I never could have imagined this situation."

She winced. In retrospect, she may have been slightly too vindictive back in that interrogation room. "Ah yes, sorry about that."

"Why would you be sorry? At least I had something interesting to show off to my friends. It definitely beats having your mark say ' _hello_ ' or ' _hi_ '. If anything, I should be the one apologizing. What does yours say? ' _So_ ', or something?"

"It says ' _You?_ ' actually," Liv answered.

"Yeah, that's not much better. It must have been hell…"

"Not really, no. And it definitely better than a ' _hello_ '. There aren't actually that many people who start of a conversation by asking ' _you?_ ', you know."

"Oh really?"

"Yes, really."

They fell into an awkward silence, fingering their almost empty glasses.

"Well, this is weird," he started.

Liv let out a laugh at that. "You can say that again. I never actually thought I'd meet you like this – I mean, you as in my soulmate or match or whatever they call it these days – and even then I never thought you'd be a zombie too."

"Well, that's actually the part that makes the most sense to me. Those matches are supposed to be about finding the person who completes you, and I can't really imagine how us being paired with a normal human could ever work.

"No, the weirdest part is that we sort of died and still somehow managed to meet – and we didn't lose our marks. That doesn't make any sense," he finally added.

"I have a friend who actually has a theory about that: according to him we didn't really _die_ , we're sort of just undead. Or something. He's still working on the something." Liv shrugged – Ravi's quest for a cure was well-meant but she wasn't sure it would ever lead to anything concrete.

Lowell hummed. "Anyway, about that date?"

Liv was saved from answering by Major's appearance at the door.

"Liv, there you are! I've been looking for you."

He looked so broken-hearted in that moment that she felt like a terrible person. Torn, she bit her lips and turned toward Lowell as she put her glass down on the table.

"I'm sorry, I have to go, but err... It was nice meeting you."

The last thing she saw as she left the room was Lowell's disheartened look, and she almost turned back.

 _(she spends a long time that night thinking on what her answer would have been had Major not shown up)_

 _(she's pretty sure she would have said yes)_

 **.vi.**

As it turned out, being a zombie not only ruined her life, but it had this annoying way of ruining what could be perfect dates - not that what they managed to salvage didn't turn out to be great after all, but for once it would be nice to plan a date and actually get to follow through with it.

When it wasn't her getting agoraphobia from some brain she had eaten, it was him being turned gay by a brain he had eaten – they definitely gave a whole new meaning to the 'you are what you eat' phrase.

The soulmate part didn't really play much of a role in their love lives either. She hadn't mentioned the fact that they had said each other's words to anyone yet – hadn't really even told she was dating someone to her family either – and she knew he had done the same.

She mentioned it to him once, over their extra spicy extra hot cocktails.

"Does it bother you that I haven't told anyone about you yet?" She asked.

"Does it bother _you_?" He quipped back.

"Not really. I'll tell them one day, just… Not now."

"Then it's fine by me."

And that was it.

Still, she showed him her mark ('that's my handwriting alright,' he had said, laughing) and after a few drinks he had lifted his shirt and shown her his back, where a fair sample of her chicken-scratch took about half of it ('it's a wonder anyone ever managed to understand what that meant,' she joked).

They filled the proper paperwork on the internet too, and life mostly went on as usual after that – except that now she finally got why everyone looked so hard for their match. Being with Lowell felt pretty darn amazing (once she dealt with the guilt of knowing that she was still breaking Major's heart) and she felt sorry for anyone who didn't have that.

Lowell showed up at the morgue every few days and they tried – and mostly failed – to behave like a normal couple, but she felt more alive than she had since becoming a zombie.

Life – or the afterlife (who could say what was going on these days?) – was pretty good.

 **.+i.**

"Is it weird that I kinda expected my life to change entirely after I met my soulmate?"

"I think we can safely say that we've had enough of one life-changing situation with the zombie thing though – I'd rather not tempt fate to throw anything worse at us."

"What could be worse than becoming a zombie?"

"Don't tempt fate Liv, you'll regret it."

"Whatever you say, loverboy."

"Loverboy? Really Liv?"

"Sorry, but the woman whose brain I've eaten really liked her nicknames."

"I guess it could be worse."

"Oh yes – you don't want to know what I called Ravi earlier…"

"You know what? I think I actually do."


End file.
